Seminar II: Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Written in the late eighteenth century, when the intellectual movement known
as the Enlightenment was in its maturity, Gibbon’s History of the Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire remains the most celebrated and influential
account of the Roman Empire. Begun around 1770, the first volume, covering the
period down to the conversion of Constantine, was published in 1776. The next
two volumes, which focused on the western Empire carried the narrative forward
to the deposition of the emperor Romulus Augustulus, were published together in
1781. The final three volumes, which are concerned less with the Latin-Germanic
West than with the history of the eastern Empire (or Byzantium) and with the struggle
with Islam in the East, appeared in 1788 – on the eve of the French Revolution
of 1789. The essay which is the subject of this week’s seminar – the ‘General
Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West’ – appears
at the end of the third volume, in the original edition.

It is often assumed by those who have not read it that the Decline and Fall is
a lament for the lost glory of a great military state, but this is not the
case. Edward Gibbon (1737–94) was a great admirer, not of the Roman Empire,
but of the ancient city as found in the Mediterranean world during the Classical
and Hellenistic periods – that is, in the five centuries before the overthrow
of the Roman Republic by Julius Caesar and the emperor Augustus. For Gibbon
it was the ancient city more than any other form of society known prior to the
eighteenth century that had permitted human beings to develop a capacity for rational
thought and self-examination – a capacity for the pursuit of ‘philosophy’.
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall is a sustained examination of the fate
of this socio-political structure at the hands of diverse historical forces – at
the hands of the imperial system of government created by Augustus and his
successors, at the hands of the new monotheistic religions that emerged in
the second and third centuries (above all, Christianity), at the hands of the
Barbarians who invaded the empire and were settled within its borders in the fourth
and fifth centuries, and so on.

Careful reading shows that Edward Gibbon is by no means unequivocal in his assessment
of the impact of these phenomena on Greco-Roman civilisation; on the contrary,
although he thought that their impact was mostly for the worse, he was often
willing to recognise the positive as well as the negative effects. The consistent
thread is a concern – a
concern which he shared with other Enlightenment historians such as David Hume
(1711–76) and to a lesser extent William Robertson (1721–93) – to
investigate the impact of various approaches to government and religion on the pursuit
of knowledge and the progress of civilisation. These priorities are especially evident
in the extract which is the subject of this week’s seminar.

Lentin, T., et al., Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire (Milton Keynes, 1979). A course prepared for the Open University.
MCN.1. There is a video that goes with this course which can be obtained by
asking at the Enquiry Desk.

McKitterick, R., and R. Quinault (eds), Edward Gibbon and Empire (Cambridge,
1987). L44.G4. A collection which is full of useful essays, including:
J. Matthews, ‘Gibbon and the Later Roman Empire: Causes and Circumstances’, and P. Ghosh, ‘The
Conception of Gibbon’s History’.

Momigliano, A., ‘After Gibbon’s Decline and Fall’,
in K. Weitzmann (ed.), Age of Spirituality: A Symposium, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York (Princeton, NJ, 1980). PN.I.

Some French Terms Used by Pocock

philosophe, philosophes = ‘philosophers’, a term applied especially
to the sceptical thinkers of the 18th-century Enlightenment in France such as
Voltaire, Montesquieu, Helvétius, and the Encyclopédistes led by
Diderot, d’Alembert and d’Holbach.

le grand siècle = the age of Louis XIV (1638–1715), the 17th
century.

thèse royale = the proposition that monarchy is to be preferred.

le Tacite de l’Ecosse = the Scottish equivalent of the Roman
historian, Tacitus.